October 04, 2009

Michael Moore doesn't mince words or rather he doesn't shy away from letting others speak for him and then communicating his sentiments via film. His latest movie, "Capitalism: A Love Story," has got to be the biggest spoof-on-words in any movie title because Michael Moore, as every scene in the movie attests, HATES capitalism. He exposes so many reprehensible aspects of capitalism - never reported by the main stream media, which gives you sugar coated nightly pablum - that it's a tribute to him that his movies are still full of fun and humor. One could imagine a much drier intellectual approach to the serious subjects he deals with here, but Moore always keeps it interesting and human centered. He doesn't so much present statistics, although there are plenty of those, as he does humanize the effects that capitalism has on real life people from people being evicted from their homes to people refusing to leave a shut down workplace, Republic Window and Doors factory in Chicago, until they're properly paid.

The most significant part of the film to me is the connection Moore draws between capitalism and Christianity. He has Jesus refuse to heal a sick person due to a "preexisting condition." He has Jesus say in answer to the question 'how can I be saved' - "seek ye first the Kingdom of Wall Street." The absurdity of having Jesus mouth contemporary values in place of the values Jesus actually espoused is revelatory. He interviews three priests each of whom says that "capitalism is evil." Moore is relentless in his condemnation of capitalism, and there is no love story here at all. The title is entirely tongue in cheek. But this is the movie's strong suit. For millenia Christians have been duped into thinking that capitalism and Christianity are compatible. It is becoming increasingly obvious that they are not. In fact the Protestant reformation can be seen as nothing more than the attempt to reconcile Christianity with capitalism. Calvanism attempts to replace helping the poor with working hard and saving your money as the ticket for God's approbation.

Clearly, the essence of Jesus' teachings and hence the essence of Christianity is that the way to salvation is to help "the least of these, my brethren." Jesus told his disciples that they would be saved because they "saw him hungry and gave him food, saw him naked and clothed him, saw him a stranger and welcomed him, saw him in prison and visited him." When his disciples expressed disbelief that they had ever seen Jesus in those conditions, he said to them "Inasmuch as you've done it to the least of these my brethren, it's as if you had done it unto me." This is the essence of Christianity, an essence too easily obfuscated and disguised by hundreds of years of watering down and vitiation. All the rest of Christianity is really a bunch of fluff compared to this essence which drives a stake through the heart of capitalism.

Moore might have gone into other religions' attitudes towards money and banking, but maybe that will be the subject of another movie. Take Islamic banking, for example. Islamic banks are forbidden to charge interest. They are forbidden to deal in derivatives or other fancy, schmancy financial products that in large measure were the cause of the current economic malaise. And Islamic banks were, therefore, not affected by the current economic crisis.

As big Western financial institutions have teetered one after the other in the crisis of recent weeks, another financial sector is gaining new confidence: Islamic banking.

Proponents of the ancient practice, which looks to sharia law for guidance and bans interest and trading in debt, have been promoting Islamic finance as a cure for the global financial meltdown.

This week, Kuwait's commerce minister, Ahmad Baqer, was quoted as saying that the global crisis will prompt more countries to use Islamic principles in running their economies. U.S. Deputy Treasury Secretary Robert M. Kimmet, visiting Jiddah, said experts at his agency have been learning the features of Islamic banking.

Though the trillion-dollar Islamic banking industry faces challenges with the slump in real estate and stock prices, advocates say the system has built-in protection from the kind of runaway collapse that has afflicted so many institutions. For one thing, the use of financial instruments such as derivatives, blamed for the downfall of banking, insurance and investment giants, is banned. So is excessive risk-taking.

...

"In Islamic finance you cannot make money out of thin air," said Amr al-Faisal, a board member of Dar al-Mal al-Islami, a holding company that owns several Islamic banks and financial institutions. "Our dealings have to be tied to actual economic activity, like an asset or a service. You cannot make money off of money. You have to have a building that was actually purchased, a service actually rendered, or a good that was actually sold."

In the Western world, bankers designing investment instruments have to satisfy government regulators. In Islamic banking, there is another group to please -- religious regulators called a sharia board. Finance lawyers work closely with Islamic finance scholars, who study and review a product before issuing a fatwa, or ruling, on its compliance with sharia law.

Islamic bankers describe depositors as akin to partners -- their money is invested, and they share in the profits or, theoretically, the losses that result. (In interviews, bankers couldn't recall a case in which depositors actually lost money; this shows that banks put such funds only in very low-risk investments, they said.)

Rather than lend money to a home buyer and collect interest on it, an Islamic bank buys the property and then leases it to the buyer for the duration of the loan. The client pays a set amount each month to the bank, then at the end obtains full ownership. The payments are structured to include the cost of the house, plus a predetermined profit margin for the bank.

One of the most glaring things the movie points out is that some corporations take out life insurance policies on their employees with themselves (not the employees) as beneficiaries. This amounts to placing a bet that their employee will die an untimely death and they, therefore, will profit from it. These have been referred to as "dead peasants" insurance. For a list of companies dealing in dead peasants insurance click here. As the movie showed succinctly, a bereft family left with tons of debt from an untimey death was juxtaposed with Wal-Mart's receiving a $100,000. plus payoff on that employee's life insurance policy. It was pointed out that young women paid off more munificently on such policies than did men. This is tantamount to profiting off the misery of fellow human beings. But then that is what capitalism does so well. We should be surprised?

Whats more, the company might use this policy to pay for retirement benefits and other perks not for you or your fellow workers, but for your companys top executives.

Sound outrageous? Such corporate-owned life insurance is also big business:

Companies pay a whopping $8 billion in premiums each year for such coverage, according to the American Council of Life Insurers, a trade group.

The policies make up more than 20% of all the life insurance sold each year.

Companies expect to reap more than $9 billion in tax breaks from these policies over the next five years. The policies are treated as whole life policies. So, companies can borrow against the policies (though the IRS won't let them write off the interest). And the death benefits are tax-free.

Hundreds of companies -- including Dow Chemical, Procter & Gamble, Wal-Mart, Walt Disney and Winn-Dixie -- have purchased this insurance on more than 6 million rank-and-file workers.

One wonders how many insurance policies have been sold on President Barack Obama's life. In this casino economy anyone can bet on anything no matter how macabre. After all Goldman Sachs sold mortgage backed securities to unsuspecting clients and then took out insurance policies betting that the securities would fail due to non-payment of mortgages. When that actually happened, Goldman profited by collecting on those insurance policies making them seem more prescient than those companies who had failed to take them out.

What one has here with capitalism is clearly a moral morass. Michael Moore is not afraid of calling a spade a spade while Congress persons are intimidated by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck. Moore is not afraid to question the validity of capitalism and to suggest that better although as yet undefined systems might be out there. Socialism is just a name, and there are many varieties of it. Capitalism/socialism hybrids seem to be working just fine in other parts of the world. What is clear is the moral depravity of a system that causes wide spread human suffering while the top 1% have more accumulated wealth than the bottom 95%.

Citibank has dubbed the modern day capitalistic economy a plutonomy - an economy by and for the rich. In a memo, Citibank touts the fact that the rich account for most of the wealth and income in advanced economies such as the US, Australia, Canada and Britain. Citibank hails these trends and assures the wealthy that they are bound to continue as long as the world wide labor market keeps the price of "outsource-able" labor down. Their thesis is "that the rich are the dominant drivers of demand in many economies throughout the world" so why not cater exclusively to them? Citibank believes, according to the report, that capitalists (the rich) are only going to get richer in coming years as they get a larger percentage of GDP primarily as a result of globalization. According to the report: "This bodes well for companies selling to or servicing the rich."

The Citibank report notes that the growing disparity in income and wealth between rich and poor may lead to some blowback or revolt among the poor as their misery index increases. This is true not only in the US but in the rest of the world where poorer peoples are already fighting back towards the world's wealthier nations. Terrorism is but one manifestation of resentment towards the rich.

In the final analysis the astonishing fact is that Michael Moore tells it like it is at a time when politicians and media shrink from even calling capitalism capitalism much less criticising it or suggesting that there might be a better way to organize a society. The right is all too willing to demonize words - like socialism and communism - and people who dare suggest that capitalism is archaic much less downright evil.

Michael Moore doesn't do much in terms of calling for a different economic system although he does suggest that economic democracy - as yet undefined - might be an alternative to capitalism. A country that has both economic and political democracy might be called a true democracy as opposed to the economic plutonomy/political democracy that we have today in the US. And the political democracy part of the hybrid is heavily influenced by campaign donations and lobbyists so it too is essentially a plutocracy - and a democracy in name only.

July 10, 2007

Michael Moore is one of the few filmmakers making movies of any value in today's world. He's a truth teller. Diogenes went around with his lamp looking for one honest man. A modern day Diogenes could say "mission accomplished" after finding Michael Moore. He takes us on a tour of the health care systems in Canada, Britain, France and Cuba, all of which are superior to the US. Americans have been totally brainwashed by health care insurance and pharmaceutical companies who have millions to spend on mind numbing TV ads. The insularity and self-referencing of the US population has made it easy for the corporate system to be successful in insuring that the US system remains very profitable for those corporations who run it. The Medicare drug benefit program was a total giveaway to the health care corporations and the legislation was in fact written by their lobbyists.

Most of the movie isn't even subject to debate since Moore uses actual footage of such things as a doctor confessing before Congress that her job was to deny care to needy people, and in return she was rewarded with bonuses. The more care she as the gatekeeper denied, the larger were her bonuses. 18,000 people die each year as a direct result of their not even having health insurance. Moore points out that having health insurance doesn't guarantee that you'll be taken care of either. Insurance companies employ people whose job it is to search through a person's records to find a reason, any reason, to deny him or her the more expensive kinds of medical care when they really need it. Even people with health insurance go bankrupt just paying the deductibles and copays. Michael assembles a group of 9/11 volunteers with severe health problems who were unable to receive care and takes them on an odyssey to Guantanamo Bay (where the detainees receive excellent health care) and then Cuba where they finally receive care for their medical problems neglected in the US.

The contrast between the throwaway people with health problems that go untreated in the US and the well and humanely treated people in a third world country like Cuba where there is a doctor in every neighborhood is stark. Cuba even trains and exports doctors to other third world countries. Some US citizens are now training in Cuba to become doctors. Universal health care in other industrialized first world countries like France, Britain and Canada leads citizens of those countries to totally take it for granted. They never have to worry about paying a bill, not even a deductible or a copay, and they never have to worry about not receiving excellent treatment. It's just one thing they they never have to think about; hence they pretty much take it for granted.

Universal health care comes in basically two flavors: socialized medicine and single payer. Socialized medicine is when the government owns the hospitals and health care facilities and the doctors are paid directly by the government. This is what they have in Britain. Moore interviews a British doctor expecting him to be ill paid and unhappy with his loss of independence. What he finds instead is someone driving a luxury car, living in luxury housing, making $200,000. a year and not at all disgruntled. In fact he's very loyal to the British system and wouldn't want to work anywhere else - especially in America. A single payer system is one in which the government replaces the insurance companies but the hospitals and medical practices are privately owned. We already have that in the US; it's called Medicare. In fact some of the proposals to fix the US system simply call for an expansion of Medicare, if not to all citizens, at least to children and the poor. The Veterans' Administration in the US is similar to socialized medicine in that the government owns the hospitals and facilities, and the doctors work directly for the government. So the US has both kinds of systems on limited bases.

The question is why don't US citizens demand the same quality of health care that other advanced countries are getting. We have 47 million uninsured; we're 38th on a list of quality of health care compared to other countries of the world. We wait in waiting rooms longer to see a doctor (that always used to be an argument they used to prove US health care was better); we pay more for prescription medicines. In general American citizens are getting screwed and go along with their own screwing. Why? Why do they vote against their own interests? Why do they participate in a system that is stacked against them? The answer is advertising. The US citizenry are lemmings who can be swayed by the millions of dollars that go into advertising either to vote for a particular candidate, buy a particular product or to be against universal health care. They're basically hook, line and sinker in the pocket of Big Brother and corporate interests. They don't get out in the streets and protest as the French do. They have little regard for their fellow man as the British and Canadians do. They're willing to sacrifice a sizable minority (47 million) if the majority are satisfied, and, let's face it, the majority of people never have to face the extreme health problems as did some of the people in Michael Moore's movie. That's what the health insurance companies and the government are counting on - a passive population willing to go along with any pablum they're fed. And the media is afraid to offend their corporate advertisers and owners. Here's a Michael Moore fact check after a recent CNN interview with Wolf Blitzer.

Michael Moore deserves the Congressional Medal of Freedom, but he'll never get it. Instead they'll politicize, demonize, denigrate, cast aspersions on and castigate him for speaking truth to power, a truth that should be obvious to every moderately intelligent and caring American. The problem is that they're a diminishing breed. Michael Moore manages to deal with important and serious subjects with a considerable amount of wit and grace. His movies are always entertaining and uplifting. Contrast this with the gazillions spent on conventional movies whose goal is nothing more than to offer you the ultimate car chase and/or killing machine, a series of mindless titillations. I guess that's the mentality of the average American. Maybe they are getting what they deserve in terms of health care.

Books

Doug Ramsey: Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul DesmondThis is a great book! Paul Desmond and Dave Brubeck formed the heart of one of the best all time jazz groups. Paul was the quintessential intellectual, white jazz musician. A talented writer, he never published anything. However author, Doug Ramsey has collected Paul's letters here. How ironic that now his writing in the form of letters to his father and ex-wife, among others, is finally published showing another window on the mind of this talented person.
A sideman, for the most part, his entire life, the Dave Brubeck Quartet might never have happened at all due to the fact that Paul had managed to offend Dave to the point where he never wanted to see him again. It had to do with a gig that Paul actually was the leader of. Paul wanted to take the summer off to play another gig, and Dave wanted Paul to let him take over the gig at the Band Box in Palo Alto, CA. Paul wouldn't let him and Dave, married with two children, proceeded to starve.
Due to an elaborate publicity campaign, when he realized the error of his ways, Paul managed to worm himself back into Dave's good graces. The rest is history.
This book is remarkable for the insight it gives into a working jazz musician's mind, wonderful pictures and interviews with the significant figures in Paul's life. Author Ramsey, not a remarkable penman himself, has nevertheless done a magnificent job of assembling all these various materials. Unlike a lot of jazz authors, he doesn't overly idolize his subject with the result that you get the feeling that you have met a real person and not a idealized version. That's high praise indeed for any biographer. (*****)